1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an internal combustion engine, and more particularly to apparatus for measuring the flow rate of the intake air into the internal combustion engine.
2. Description of the Prior Art
An electronically controlled fuel injection system used with an internal combustion engine senses the flow rate of intake air into the engine to generate a signal representing the flow rate and injects fuel into the intake passageway through an electromagnetic valve so that a predetermined air-fuel ratio is supplied based on the signal. In order accurately to control the air-fuel ratio, which seriously affects fuel economy and exhaust performance of the engine, it is necessary to measure the flow rate of the intake air into the engine.
Recently, attention has been drawn to a commercially available Karman vortex flow meter, which can serve as an intake air flow meter. A pillar member is arranged in the intake air passageway to generate an array of vortices downstream of the pillar member, and the sensor electrically detects the frequency of occurrence of the vortices, which is proportional to the flow velocity of the intake air. This flow meter is simple in structure, highly reliable in operation, and inexpensive, but is affected greatly by intake pulsations occurring during high load engine operation when the throttle valve is fully opened to result in a disturbance in the Karman vortex array, thereby involving a relatively large error in the measurement during high load engine operation. That is, this flow meter outputs a pulse signal corresponding to the frequency of Karman vortices created in the intake air, which pulse signal is averaged by an integrating circuit to produce an analog voltage signal representing the flow rate of the intake air. If certain of the vortices in the vortex array fail to form, corresponding pulses will be missing from the shaped pulse signal with the result that the resulting smoothed voltage signal does not correspond to the actual flow rate of the intake air. If this occurs, the use of an averaging circuit having a relatively large smoothing coefficient and for smoothing the shaped signal will prevent rapid changes in the output, but lower the response speed of the averaging circuit during partial engine load. Thus during a transient interval such as when the intake air into the engine fluctuates, the error involved in the measurement would increase.
Another prior art flow meter has been proposed which determines the operational state of an internal combustion engine, using a sensor such as an intake vacuum switch, a throttle switch and so forth to produce a signal representing the operational state, and switches to a different smoothing coefficient in the region of high load engine operation, in response to the signal. However, the use of the throttle switch, intake vacuum switch and so forth makes the flow meter expensive, makes the intake passage structure complicated, and makes the flow meter less reliable.